There was only one way she wouldn’t be.
Unsteadily, she struggled to prop herself over his endless chest. Looking down at him, she marveled again that all this beauty and power could be hers, even if temporarily.
Then she made the tentative bid for permanence.
“I want to amend our arrangement, Raiden. I want to remain your lover after you’re married.”
Eight
Raiden sat up slowly, not only because Scarlett’s offer had rocked him to his core, because he felt he’d drained his very life force inside her. Four times.
After that statement, that she’d been born to love him, he didn’t know what had happened to him. It was as if every iota of control he’d ever practiced had been building up an opposite wildness, and only a measure of that had been released in the past with her, probably because on some level he’d felt there had been something not quite right. Since they’d been together again, their whole situation had rationed his uninhibitedness. Then she’d made that declaration, and it had been as if the dam inside him had burst.
The way he’d taken her, in a sustained eruption of raging hunger, the way she’d surrendered unconditionally, and the explosive pleasure they’d wrung from each other... It had been transfiguring, transcendent.
After that last time he’d taken her in the shower, he’d taken her back to bed and had been feeling another cataclysm building. Then she’d staggered up and made that out-of-the-blue offer and everything had dissipated with shock.
She was now looking at him avidly, her hair hanging around her gleaming shoulders in thick, wet locks, her lips and body showing the effects of his fierce possession.
He’d never seen anything more beautiful, known anything more overpowering.
The seductive smile playing on her kiss-swollen lips didn’t reach her eyes. Those were faltering as she painted his chest in caresses. “Powerful men in Japan almost always have mistresses, and it’s accepted as long as they’re discreet and don’t disgrace their wives and families. I will abide by any precautions you need to maintain our secret.” She pouted in a rickety attempt at reprimand. “You’ll certainly have to curb the impulses you’ve been having of late, popping up wherever I am, taking me out or home for all to see.”
He suddenly wanted to get up, get away and stop this.
But before he could move, she hugged him fiercely around the waist, laid her hot face over his thudding heart. Her lips trembled against his skin as she spelled out her offer. “If you can’t have enough of me, as I can’t have enough of you, this doesn’t have to end. I don’t want to lose you, and I’ll do anything, stay anywhere, as long as I can have you like this. I know once you get married your situation will change, but you don’t have to leave me behind to have the family, the heritage and the heirs you’ve planned to have for so long. You can have me indefinitely if you want, and also have everything else you ever craved and deserve.”
Raiden’s head filled with cacophony, every response that screamed in his mind jumbling together, paralyzing him, muting him.
She was giving him a carte blanche to her life.
It was again the last thing he’d expected. Not that he’d expected anything, being tossed about in last night’s tumult.
But if he’d been able to think, he would have come to one conclusion. That it was no longer a possibility he’d give her up on their agreed-on date, or at all. He couldn’t even think of a life without her now. Couldn’t think of another reason to live but being with her, being hers. He was finally free to face that he’d loved her from the first moment and had never stopped loving her. But he now loved her with a profundity he hadn’t thought himself capable of. And he now knew she reciprocated his emotions in full. If he’d thought at all, he would have thought he’d be the one to plead with her not to leave his side.